Beat the Streets – Nottingham’s newest music festival

01Jan2018

by Neil Skinner

The community of Nottingham will come together for Beat The Streets, a new charity festival to be staged on Sunday 28 January 2018.

The project launches to raise funds to tackle the growing homelessness crisis in the city. Beat The Streets is being delivered by DHP Family in collaboration with local organisations and music groups including I’m Not from London; Farmyard Records; Hockley Hustle and Rough Trade.

More than 80 national and local acts are confirmed to play across over 10 stages in venues across the city centre.

Rock City, Rescue Rooms, The Bodega and Stealth are among the first wave of venues confirmed as taking part and will also be donating their proceeds from the bar take on the day.

Organisers have reported that donations are coming in thick and fast for Beat the Streets. Within a few hours, the event’s JustGiving page had accepted more than £1,200 in donations from the participating music venues, in addition to the revenue raised from the hundreds of tickets sold to date.

DHP’s George Akins, commented: “It is increasingly evident that we have a growing problem once again with homelessness in the city with many people reaching crisis point. The aim with Beat the Streets is to make it a force for positive change, using music to bring together the people of Nottingham to raise funds to help make a difference where it is so desperately needed.”

With rough sleeping in the city at an all-time high, the Beat the Streets team is calling on the community of Nottingham to get behind the event. They are on the lookout for more collaborators from the worlds of music, art & design, food, and business, as well as urging people to buy a ticket with all proceeds being donated to the charity.

“We are experiencing record numbers of rough sleeping across the country. In Nottingham we have recently found 49 people sleeping out on one night, which stands at the highest number since our count began,” explained Jason Marriott, manager of Framework’s Street Outreach Team.

Marriott said that despite a great effort between charities and the City Council to assist people who are street homeless the problem is growing.

“Without more preventative help in place and a boost of intensive support when making a transition off the streets, those who end up rough sleeping have a reduced chance of making successful journeys away from them. At Framework, we work hard to provide this help for people in danger or rough sleeping and experiencing it but the winter is a particular time for concern as the number of people living outside increases, our resources are stretched and risk of death increases due to severe weather conditions.”

The money raised from Beat the Streets will go towards improving the effectiveness of Framework’s Street Outreach Team. This includes putting qualified social workers in place to start assessments on the streets, towards emergency accommodation to protect people in below zero conditions and towards resettlement workers who enable smooth transitions from the street to a tenancy.

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